CASE STUDY

The Bouqs uses Custora's segmentation to increase total revenue on Mother's Day by 45% and total orders by 64%

The Bouqs Company is an online floral retailer delivering flowers fresh from eco-friendly, sustainable farms to doorsteps nationwide. Based in California, they made their breakthrough in the flower industry in 2012, disrupting the traditional supply chain with their direct-to-consumer model, reducing overhead costs and working directly with farmers, so flowers are cut-to-order — allowing them to reduce waste by up to 90% and keep flowers fresher for longer.

The startup has redefined the flower delivery service. The website and mobile app make ordering flowers easy with their simplified on-demand purchases, subscriptions and price transparency.

The Challenge

The Bouqs Co has been able to introduce some basic segmentation using their email service provider (ESP), and saw quick wins by aligning creative strategies around gender. For past holidays, some segmentation was also done around customers with high net promoter scores and retargeting campaigns were sent to past purchasers.

Their marketing team would typically send two promotional emails a week. Emails were sent to customers that showed signs of engagement (recent opens/clicks), and another email was sent to the full list of recipients that had opted-in.

Their paid Facebook ads were typically focused on brand perception to the general public, but they saw the potential to improve ad targeting. They wanted to make a shift to introduce messages that would resonate with customers at various lifecycle stages and reactivate customers who hadn’t engaged with the brand for a long time.

The Bouqs Co’s team knew more complex and smart segmentation could advance their email campaigns and paid social ads to target high-value customers and win back those showing signs of churn.

The Solution

Using Custora’s clustering algorithm to run on their transactional data, The Bouqs Co was able to have better intelligence around the number of active customers, predicted customer lifetime value, preferred price point values, and brand/category preferences. Using this information, they were able to segment distinct shopper personas including VIP’s (from bronze to platinum), shopping preferences (ie rose vs. tulips), gift recipient preferences, lost prospects, and churning customers.

By developing a strong data-driven and design-driven strategy, The Bouqs Co combined email creative enhancements with advanced segmentation to drive more purchases — and just in time for Valentine’s Day.

They began testing messages on past rose purchasers from the previous Valentine’s Day holidays and sent them a separate ‘Order Early for V Day’ campaign. The personalized rose-purchase version outperformed a generic version to this cohort.

They also targeted higher average order value (AOV) customers and marketed to them with a ‘grand upsell’ banner in a variety of emails. Additionally when these customers landed on product detail pages on the site they were automatically defaulted to grand size options. These customers with the grand upsell treatment converted at a higher AOV than other customers resulting in a sizable increase in incremental revenue.

They continued to roll this strategy out for Mother’s Day and looked for other ways to differentiate the treatment for customers who fell into different segments.

The marketing team executed a Mother’s Day retention campaign, which aligned customer segments with personalized promotional campaigns (i.e ‘order early' and ‘last chance’ promotions VIP’s v’s non-VIP’s). They also tested various forms of creative to drive higher conversion rates.

Results

The Bouqs Co saw impressive results from combining new creatives with a segmentation strategy and personalized marketing campaigns. The total revenue from this year’s Mother’s Day retention campaigns saw a lift of over 45% compared to Mother’s Day in 2017. The unsubscribe rate was also down by 27% compared to last year — it was clear their messaging and design were more relevant and engaging to their customers.

With their more advanced drip email campaigns, The Bouqs Co targeted churning customers and successfully tested win-back and churn prevention messages, along with an improved ‘prospect welcome series’ for new customers. They saw a 20% increase in total revenue from drip campaigns, and total orders increased by an impressive 64.1%.

The Bouqs Co also generated a large amount of orders from Facebook campaigns by targeting VIP’s, past Mother’s Day customers, and new prospects while staying within cost per order targets. The Bouqs Co’s team now plans to test direct mail and push more paid social ads to VIPs and past holiday purchasers to further drive revenue in future holidays.